Researchers and librarians have been organizing information into indices for many thousands of years. The Library of Alexandria over 2000 years ago included an index of the information found in their hundreds of thousands of scrolls. Up until a few decades ago, the Library of Congress included a card catalog indexing the titles, authors, and categories of each of their millions of books and other media. Today, public libraries nearly always include a computerized, searchable book database.
Similarly, in the last century, corporations have created indices of their information relating to the goods and services they offer. Walmart has an index of massive size that includes every product they sell, linked to an inventory management database showing how many of those products are sitting on each store shelf. Amazon.com sells more products than Walmart, and the Amazon.com Web site includes an index of all these product offerings. A customer can search the Amazon.com index to find a desired product offering.
Finally, companies such as Google and Yahoo! have a primary focus to make all information searchable via their respective proprietary indexes, each covering tens of billions of Web sites, product databases, and other informational sources. A visitor to either of these Web sites can input a query that is directed to the Web site index.
The one constant characteristic throughout all the search systems described above is that it is only possible to find items that exist in the library or database. That is, when performing a search that is supported by any of these indexes, the search is directed only to the particular one of the indexes in question. When searching for something beyond the particular index in question, the result is always null. A null search result is not especially helpful.
It should be apparent that the resource search and location experience would be improved if the resources and network conditions over which search is performed could be enlarged. The present invention satisfies this need.